Facebook Home

Facebook Home has been heralded by some as Facebook’s first shot at Google and Apple and a warning that they’re going to enter the phone market with their own phone and OS soon. Still others have warned that Facebook Home may spell trouble for Google. I think Facebook Home is great for Google and great for the Android ecosystem as a whole.

After updating the standard Facebook and Messenger apps this morning to prepare for the arrival of Facebook Home, Facebook has released the final piece to the puzzle. That’s right, Facebook Home is now available for select devices. If you own a Samsung Galaxy S3, Galaxy Note 2, HTC One, One X, or One X+, feel free to grab the app from Google Play for free. (more…)

Initially, since Facebook Home is said to only be compatible with about five devices, we figured it would be the same for the Chat Head feature as well. As most know, Chat Heads is the only part of the Home experience we are really excited about, so to see that after an update to Messenger, that Chat Heads works just fine on any device is pretty great. (more…)

We’re not even a week out from Facebook’s announcement of the HTC First and their new home replacement called Facebook Home, and we already have a leaked beta build to play around with. Thanks to Modaco, you can give Home a spin as long as your device has a screen resolution of 1280×768 or less and doesn’t have Facebook baked into your system (meaning you can uninstall Facebook). If you have a Nexus, it would be the perfect phone to test this on. (more…)

Back in early February, specs were leaked for an HTC device codenamed the M4. The M4 didn’t have any specs that jumped off the page, but now there is an apparent image floating around the web for the upcoming device. And what excellent timing and coincidence that the HTC First was debuted yesterday, with almost matching specs. A 4.3″ 720p display, Snapdragon processor, 1GB of RAM, and not much else going on. (more…)

As you have already seen, today’s coverage mostly focused around the announcement of Facebook’s Home launcher for Android and their partnership with both AT&T and HTC to create the HTC First. This size of an investment in the mobile space is what Facebook has been needing, given that the mobile experience for their service on Android is somewhat lacking.

So far, what I think is great on Facebook’s part is that they are not limiting this new experience to only those that buy an HTC First. Android users that currently own one of the five initially supported devices will be able to download Home from Google Play and immediately immerse themselves with status updates and pictures from friends. By taking this route, Facebook is truly trying to put this experience into the hands of as many people as possible. It may not seem that way yet, since the HTC First is an AT&T exclusive, but that was purely a business move.

With Home as your default launcher, you have the ability to access instant messages between friends no matter what you are doing on your device, look through your News Feed as soon as you unlock the device, and bookmark certain applications that you use more often than others. While Home does seem sort of like an extremely dignified widget, there are bound to be hundreds of thousands of users in no time at all.

Let us know down below if you plan on making Facebook’s Home your default launcher of choice. As a bonus, feel free to let us know why or why not in the comments section below. Personally, I am dying to hear everyone’s thoughts on this.

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